Nevertheless, Dalehouse had not felt as well in weeks. In spite of bone-bruising fatigue. In spite of the star that might explode at any moment. In spite of the fact that Marge Men-ninger’s shopping list had overlooked a supply of spare hiking boots, and so he limped on a right foot that was a mass of blisters. He was not the unluckiest. Three of the effectives had been unable to go on at all. “We’ll come back for you,” Margie had promised; but Dalehouse thought she lied, and he could see in the eyes of the casualties that they were certain of it.
And still he would have sung as he marched, if he’d had breath enough for it.
It had been raining on and off for nearly forty hours — mean, wind-driven rain that kept them sodden in the steamy heat even when it let up, and chilled when it drenched them. That didn’t matter, either. It was regrettable, because it meant that Charlie and the two remaining members of his flock could not keep in touch with them visually. (He had had to take the radio away from the balloonist before they left — far too easy for the Greasies to intercept.) Whenever the clouds lightened, Dalehouse searched the sky for his friend. He never saw him, never heard his song, but he knew he was up there somewhere. It wasn’t serious. The weather that kept Charlie from scouting danger for them kept the Greasies from providing it.
There were twelve of them still toiling toward the Greasy camp. They had left the rest of the survivors — the highly impermanent survivors, if this expedition didn’t do what it was supposed to — back at the base with orders to look as though they were twice as numerous as they were. Margie herself had transmitted the last message to the Greasies: “We are beginning construction of underground shelters. When the flare is over we can discuss a permanent peace. Meanwhile, if you approach we will shoot on sight.” Then she pulled the plug on the radio and crawled into Cappy’s plane for the last ferry trip.
They had less than ten kilometers to go — a three hour stroll under good conditions, but it would take them all of a day. It was scramble down one side of a ravine and crawl up the other, peer over the top of a crest and scuttle down its other face. And it was not just the terrain. They were all heavily loaded. Food, water, weapons, equipment. Everything they would need they had to carry on their backs.
The red cylinders marked “Fuel Elements — Replacement” were the worst. Each cylinder contained hundreds of the tiny clad needles and weighed more than a kilogram. Twelve of them made a heavy load.
At first they took turns carrying the puzzle pieces that would unite to form a nuclear bomb. One of the tricks was to make sure they didn’t unite prematurely, and at every stop Lieutenant Kristianides supervised the stacking of knapsacks so that no two bomb loads were within a meter of each other. The chance was very small that they could in fact be dropped, kicked, or jostled into a configuration of critical mass. Making that happen on purpose when desired had been a serious challenge for some of the best munitions experts on Earth; for that purpose they carried another twenty kilos of highly sophisticated casing and trigger. Without that there was no real danger — or so Marge assured them all. But they were careful anyway, because in their guts none of them believed the assurance. Perhaps not even Marge.
At the end of the first march Margie had gone through the party, checking loads. When she came to Ana Dimitrova, sitting hugging her knees next to Danny Dalehouse, she said softly, “Are you sterile?”
“What? Really! What a question!” But then Margie shook her head.
“Sorry, I’m just tired. I should have remembered you aren’t.” And she grinned and winked at both Dalehouse and Ana; but when they picked up packs again Nan’s load was changed to water flasks, and limping old Marguerite Moseler was carrying the fuel rods.
Margie looked terrible, and at every stop she seemed to look worse. Her plumpness was long gone. The bone structure of her face showed for the first time in years, and her voice was a rasp. More than that, her complexion was awful. When the Krinpit had buried her for two hours, its molting juices overrode her defenses. A day later she had broken out in great purplish blotches and a skin discoloration like sunburn. She said it did not hurt; there, too, Dalehouse thought she lied.
But he thought she was telling the truth about one very important thing, and perhaps that was the reason he could not repress a feeling of cheer. The bomb they were carrying would not be used.
He had been the one to propose it, and she had accepted the idea at once. “Of course,” she said. “I don’t want to destroy their camp. I want it, all of it — not only for us, but for the future of the human race on Jem. The bomb’s best use is as a threat, and that’s what we’ll use it for.”
He said as much to Ana at their last halt before coming in sight of the Greasy base. “She’s planning for future generations. At least she thinks it’s worth keeping your chromosomes intact.”
“Of course,” said Ana, surprised. “I have that confidence too.” And so, Danny Dalehouse was discovering, did he. Bad as things were, he had hope. It carried him through that last belly-crawl, three hundred meters in the drenching rain, into the muddy cave that was their point of entrance for the burrower tunnels under the Greasy base. It sustained him while Major Vandemeer and Kris Kristianides painfully and gingerly assembled the parts of the detonator and fitted the fuel rods into it. It survived after Margie and Vandemeer and two others wriggled their way into the abandoned courses and disappeared from sight. The part of his life, of all their lives, that they were living through at that moment was misery and fear. Maybe worse than that, it was self-reproach; they were doing something that Dalehouse could not think of as noble or even tolerable. It was a holdup. Armed robbery. No better than a mugging. But it would be over. And a better time would come! And that hope kept him going for two full hours after Margie and the others had crawled away. Until Kris Kristianides, looking scared and harried, checked her watch and said, “That’s it. From now on, everybody stay inside. Face the wall. Hands over your eyes. When the fireball comes, don’t look up. Wait ten minutes at least. I’ve got goggles. I’ll tell you when you—”
Then they drowned her out, Dalehouse first and loudest. “She’s going to do it! But she promised—”
“Shit, Dalehouse, she couldn’t keep that promise! The Greasies would think it was a bluff. She’s going to take out their arms and food just like we planned, and then we’ll move in and wipe them up.”
“What insanity!” cried Ana. “There’ll be nothing there! The fallout will kill us if we go into the camp.”
“Maybe. I’ve got a counter; we’ll check everything out. The important thing’s the planes. If we get them we can get to their base on Farside.” She hesitated. She had been carefully rehearsed in all this and had carried the secret with her for more than a day. But she had dreaded this moment. If it had not been for her burns, she would have been in the warrens with the colonel and the major, and a lot happier there than she was here. “Anyway,” she finished, “there’s nothing we can do about it now. She’ll blow the bomb in the next ten minutes. Get your faces down!”
And then, at last, hope was dead.
For the Brood Mother, too, all hope was gone. Blind and alone she moved slowly down through the tunnels to the only place left for her to be.
The thirty-meter level was for pups and outcasts. It was a place to play growing-up games or, at the end of all games, a place to die. Mother dr’Shee had never been there before. She had been a biddable pup, trained early to responsibility. As a tiny thing she had found it tingly-thrilling to listen to the stories of the half-growns, shivering in delight as she groped for the teat in her nurse’s sheltering silk. But she had never explored the adventurous levels for herself. Not once. She had known that the time would come soon enough when, at the end of her life, she would drag herself down to see those old, unvisited levels and die.